Overview
- Microsoft’s outage began Thursday evening and quickly spread worldwide, with user reports in dozens of countries and Downdetector logging problems across more than 70 regions.
- Engineers traced the disruption to an overloaded process that builds secure connections and rolled back a recent configuration change while boosting capacity to restore service.
- Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 functions were affected, forcing businesses and agencies to switch to phones, paper records or local systems and causing delayed email delivery for some users.
- Critical organisations including the NHS, parts of the U.S. House, Australian security agencies and Euronext activated contingency plans or priority recovery steps to maintain essential operations.
- The incident follows other major cloud outages in 2024 and 2026 and has renewed political pressure in Europe for open-source, sovereign or multi‑vendor alternatives to reduce single‑provider risk.